God meant it for good

How the life of Joseph can give us hope for the future.

In the Book of Genesis almost a quarter of the chapters are devoted to the life of Joseph. This would indicate how important the LORD sees the events in the life of Joseph to be, yet we could almost summarise Joseph’s life as simply being the means of getting the Israelites into Egypt. In fact, the whole story of Joseph could be reduced to a few sentences and the story could still be concluded with Jacob blessing his sons and Joseph commanding that his embalmed body be taken out of Egypt and buried in Canaan, yet much space is given to Joseph. So, why is so much attention given to Joseph in Genesis? Surprisingly, Joseph does not get much mention outside the Book of Genesis.

One thing that has struck me in the Bible is how much space is given to the lives of individuals rather than to the great world events that so preoccupy many of us in our day. We do not even know the name of the Pharaoh that Joseph dealt with and neither do we know the name of the Pharaoh of the Exodus, yet we do know the name of the two midwives who defed the Pharaoh’s command (Exodus 1:15).